The Quiet Zone

by Stephen Kurczy

  Endpaper

  Dedication

  To Jenna, for taking this ride

  Contents

  Cover

  Endpaper

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue: “To Anyone Who Will Listen”

  Part One:

  Quiet Search

  Chapter One: “Over the Mountain”

  Chapter Two: “One of the Science Capitals of the World”

  Chapter Three: “Lots of Bad News”

  Chapter Four: “Caretaker of a National Treasure”

  Chapter Five: “Spook Stuff”

  Chapter Six: “Our Own Log Lady”

  Chapter Seven: “A Powerful Thing”

  Chapter Eight: “Back to the Land”

  Chapter Nine: “A Low Roar”

  Part Two:

  Quiet Discovery

  Chapter Ten: “Local Nazi Diaspora”

  Chapter Eleven: “Command the Evil to Be Gone”

  Chapter Twelve: “Murder by WiFi”

  Chapter Thirteen: “Papers and Pencils”

  Chapter Fourteen: “Behind the Curve”

  Chapter Fifteen: “Mountain Justice”

  Chapter Sixteen: “Where’s the Hospital?”

  Chapter Seventeen: “The True Epitome of Darkness”

  Part Three:

  Quiet End?

  Chapter Eighteen: “A Do-or-Die Situation”

  Chapter Nineteen: “You’ve Got to Experience It”

  Chapter Twenty: “The Only Way Out”

  Chapter Twenty-One: “Shutter the Place and Move On”

  Chapter Twenty-Two: “Don’t You Forget This”

  Chapter Twenty-Three: “The Never-Ending Story”

  Epilogue: “Masters of Social Distancing”

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  “To Anyone Who Will Listen”

  DEEP IN THE MOUNTAINS OF APPALACHIA, on a cold January afternoon, I scanned the trees in search of a simple wooden cross, the kind that might mark the site of a roadside car accident and warn passersby, Don’t let this happen to you. I suddenly felt I was being watched. I heard an engine rev. I looked back toward the gravel parking lot of a Mennonite church several hundred feet away and watched a truck loop around my car and peel off.

  I turned back to the shadowy forest, searching among the fallen leaves for the cross. I was told it would be little more than two tree branches tied together with a vine and propped upright, the place where a woman had killed herself. Her death was not reported in the local newspaper, but it was whispered about in the community. She was allergic to WiFi, people were saying.

  Circling among the spindly oaks and maples, all I could find were old bottles, empty beer cans, and animal bones—roadkill remnants, perhaps appropriate for a county where the biggest tourism event was the annual Roadkill Cook-Off. I was a few miles outside of Green Bank, West Virginia, a remote community with a claim to being “the quietest town in America”—which was what had first drawn me here years earlier. In Green Bank, the nation’s oldest federal radio astronomy observatory operated a collection of giant, dish-shaped telescopes that measured the invisible energy waves raining down on Earth from the heavens. To detect those faint radio waves, the observatory demanded quiet from the surrounding community. I stood near the center of the National Radio Quiet Zone. It was a place where cellphone signals, WiFi, and other electronic noise were tightly monitored and restricted.

  The quiet had attracted a number of groups over the decades, the latest being people who sought refuge from our increasingly digital, electrified world. These people described feeling ill when exposed to iPhones and smart meters, refrigerators and microwaves. In essence, they felt allergic to modern life. And many felt they had nowhere to go but Green Bank. They worshipped the quiet here, walking barefoot beneath the massive radio telescopes, one of which was taller than the Statue of Liberty. It was like a Statue of Quiet, marking this as a Holy Land of silence. Or so I had thought.

  Now there was this other marker, a cross in the woods. The woman who killed herself had been smart, driven, and compassionate, a graduate of Vassar College and Harvard Business School. She had worked on Wall Street, then dropped out of the corporate world to advocate for animal rights and care for disabled people in the Charlottesville area of Virginia, until she felt debilitated by the onset of a new disease called “electromagnetic hypersensitivity” (EHS). In September 2018, she came to Green Bank.

  “The world is a wondrous place, full of beauty, mystery, miracles, and love,” the woman wrote in a final, handwritten letter found in her car and addressed “to anyone who will listen.” “The world is also full of perils, known and unknown, visible and invisible. I am writing now about a mostly unknown, invisible peril—electromagnetic frequencies, or EMFs . . . Please do not let our children grow up in an inescapable sea of invisible, insidious waves.”

  After writing the letter, the woman had parked outside the Mennonite church, walked into the woods where I stood, and shot herself in the head with a .38 Smith & Wesson revolver. It was likely the first time she ever used a gun, according to her family and friends. At least one neighbor heard the shot but thought nothing of it, gunshots being common in an area known for its hunting. After three days, a road crew found the body. Authorities, family, and friends began piecing together the woman’s final days and months.

  What had driven such a successful, empathetic woman to purchase a gun and end her life one evening? She appeared to have sacrificed herself in an attempt to call attention to our very human need for quiet and raise the alarm about its endangered state. But who would listen to her?

  Part One

  Quiet Search

  * * *

  They found rich, good pasture, and the land was spacious, peaceful, and quiet.

  —1 CHRONICLES 4:40

  * * *

  Chapter One

  “Over the Mountain”

  DEER CREEK VALLEY WAS DARKENING, the surrounding ring of forested peaks fading into the clouds. Jenna and I had been on the road all day, driving through the Allegheny range of West Virginia and the seemingly abandoned towns of Pocahontas County. Through stretches of thick forest and rolling mountains, the road wound uphill for miles and then careened downward at deadly steep grades. Big-eyed cows stared as we drove by their pastures. Occasionally, we’d see a gas station and think, Oh, there is civilization here.

  Just outside the town of Green Bank, I parked alongside a clapboard church—we’d seen more churches than people that day. I got out of the car and crunched over the glazed snow to the Chestnut Ridge Country Inn next door. I knocked—no answer. I turned the knob—the door was locked. On the porch of the colonial home was a chalkboard that read “Welcome Jesse and Jennifer,” dated February 2017. But we were not Jesse and Jennifer, and it was March.

  I glanced at Jenna, who appeared increasingly anxious. We had no cell service, no WiFi, and nowhere to sleep. Her iPhone searched in vain for a signal, its status wheel spinning like a compass inside the Bermuda Triangle. A few miles away, a platter-size road sign had vaguely explained the reason for our disconnection: “You Are Now Entering the West Virginia Radio Quiet Zone.” A cat leaped onto the porch and nuzzled my sneaker, oblivious to my unease. I felt like a child in the silent woods, spooked by how loud quiet can be. Feeling untethered and lost, we were struggling to answer a basic question: Where will we sleep tonight?

  We climbed back into the car and drove five miles to Henry’s Quick Stop, a gas station that also served as a grocery store, restaurant, and ice-cream parlor, selling everything from scratch
-offs to gun ammo in Green Bank, which had an estimated population of 250. It was our third time at Henry’s that afternoon. We’d first pulled in for gas before trying to check into the nearby Boyer Motel, a manila-colored structure that reminded me of the Bates Motel from Psycho; it was closed, perhaps for the best. We’d then returned to Henry’s and gotten directions to the Chestnut Ridge Country Inn. Now back at Henry’s, I asked the bearded attendant where else we might spend the night. He shrugged. Jenna opened a tourist brochure and saw a listing for lodging in Durbin, about ten miles north on the sole road that cut through town.

  “Could I call from here?” I asked.

  “Go on ahead,” the attendant said, gesturing to a landline beside the register. “Store closes in fifteen minutes. Streets roll up at seven.”

  He handed me a heavy phone book. (When had I last used a phone book?) Its thin pages held the names and numbers of Pocahontas County’s 8,200 residents—about one-tenth the population of the New York City neighborhood where we lived. I flipped through and found the number for a place called Station 2.

  “We’ve got space,” a woman said over the phone. “But we’re five minutes to closing so you’d better hurry up.”

  As we raced through town with a pepperoni pizza from Henry’s, we passed the area’s quiet authority: the Green Bank Observatory, founded in 1956 by the National Science Foundation (NSF). We could see a handful of radio telescopes poking above the trees, the largest a 485-foot-tall tangle of white beams holding a giant dish the size of two football fields. It looked like a washbasin for Godzilla. The telescopes sat at the bottom of a four-mile-long valley surrounded by mountains up to 4,800 feet tall, which created a natural barrier against the outside world’s noise. Operating any electrical equipment within ten miles of here was illegal if it caused interference to the telescopes, punishable by a state fine of fifty dollars per day. Surrounding that ten-mile radius, a thirteen-thousand-square-mile National Radio Quiet Zone—an area larger than the combined landmass of Connecticut and Massachusetts—further limited cell service and all kinds of wireless communications systems. The restrictions were based on a simple premise: To listen, we have to hear. To unlock the mysteries of the universe, we have to be quiet.

  The physical and bureaucratic barriers isolated an already remote area. In terms of the absence of man-made electronic noise, no other modern-day community was considered as quiet. A handful of other radio quiet zones existed worldwide, but they were in essentially uninhabited areas. Green Bank was a living, breathing community—though sparsely populated, to be sure. Three-fifths of the surrounding county of Pocahontas was state or federal forest. Its 941 square miles had a total of three traffic lights and three official towns. (Green Bank, as an unincorporated community, was not among them.) Residents shared one weekly newspaper, one high school, and a couple roadside telephone booths. The population density of about nine people per square mile was the lowest in West Virginia and one of the lowest anywhere east of the Mississippi River. Going to Walmart was a hundred-mile round trip that required traversing some of the Mountain State’s tallest peaks. Outsiders were considered “flatlanders” or “come-heres.” Locals were “mountain people.” History crept forward in a place like this; many residents knew which great-great-grandparent settled the land and on which side their great-grandfather fought during the Civil War.

  Earlier in the day, Jenna and I had stopped at a scenic overlook of the Monongahela National Forest, an expanse of rolling hills and layered mountain ridges covered in pine trees speckled white with snow. While West Virginia was known for its mining industry, this area of the state largely lacked coal, which had spared it from land-scarring strip-mining and mountaintop removal practices. The evergreen forests were thick with mountain laurel and, in warmer months, teeming with mushrooms, ramps, ginseng, goldenseal, and sassafras. The county was the source of eight major rivers flowing to the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico. It was a land with evocative names like Stony Bottom, Clover Lick, Thorny Creek, Briery Knob, and Green Bank, with that last name holding an almost mythical allure as a place where the grass was greener and life was fuller. Four hours from Washington, D.C., Green Bank sounded to Jenna and me like a modern-day Walden that could free us from the exasperating demands of being always online and always reachable. Visiting was to be a respite from our digital lives.

  A truck had parked beside us at the scenic overlook. An older man got out and waved. His wife, Patty, sat in the truck with their two dogs. We all started chatting. I asked the man, Les, if there was ever a moment when he’d wished for cell service. He launched into a half-hour tale about going hunting, slicing his hand to the bone as he gutted a deer, and then trudging miles to the nearest road while he bled through a makeshift tourniquet. “If I’d had a cellphone, I could have had a truck waiting for me,” Les said. “But other than that time . . .” By this point I’d shoved my freezing hands deep inside my pockets, though the chill didn’t seem to bother Les, who was chain-smoking Marlboros with gloveless hands; he’d smoked so many Marlboros over the years that he’d purchased his red Marlboro-branded jacket with points accumulated from the cigarette packs. No devices could interrupt our conversation, nobody could zone out on a smartphone. Before we parted, Les and Patty had invited us to their house for spaghetti and meatballs. (When had I last been invited to a stranger’s home for dinner?)

  We pulled into Durbin, a bygone logging town on the Greenbrier River. An old railway track was saddled with rusting boxcars. A row of boarded-up storefronts held our destination: Station 2, a combination hair salon, greasy spoon, and four-room motel. We parked in an empty lot. As we trudged up a set of wooden stairs to the entryway, a wiry man with translucent eyes that matched his pale complexion swung open the door and stared hard at me.

  “We’re closed,” he grumbled.

  “Thanks,” I said, “but they’re expecting us.”

  “No,” he said. “We’re closed.”

  “It’s all right,” I said, skirting around him, “we’re sleeping here.”

  Shouldn’t have said that, I thought.

  IN THE FOYER OF STATION 2, a blond woman stood behind a cash register, which was perched on a glass cabinet filled with hunting knives and boxes of gun ammo. She explained that the restaurant was owned by the local fire chief, hence the decorative fire hose and thick bunker coat hanging on one wall. Charging us $77.28 for the night, she gave us a room key and led us through the kitchen and up a dark stairway. I mentioned that we’d tried to stay at the Boyer Motel, but it seemed abandoned.

  “They don’t even have WiFi,” she said.

  “There’s WiFi here?” I asked, the excitement in my voice betraying my craving to get online.

  “It’s free under the name ‘Station 2.’”

  While we were still within the Quiet Zone and without cellphone reception, we were now far enough from Green Bank’s telescopes for the legal use of WiFi, apparently. We were given a room with a double bed and flat-screen television. Before my bag hit the floor, I was logged on to the internet with my iPod. Soon my laptop was also connected, releasing a flood of emails and alerts that I’d missed over the previous twenty-four hours. The radio silence was broken. Jenna scrolled on her iPhone. We had teleported into separate worlds.

  “We should check out that bar in town,” Jenna said after a while, referencing a joint that we’d spotted on the drive into Durbin.

  I didn’t look up from my laptop.

  “Let’s go for one drink,” she prodded—not that she needed a nightcap, just that she thought we should do more with our evening than stare at tiny screens.

  We walked up the deserted street to Al’s Upper Inn, the only establishment still open at the ungodly hour of 8:30 P.M. All conversations stopped as we entered. Jenna is Korean and I look like a nerdy white journalist, which is to say that we looked like outsiders. A half dozen people stared at us.

  “We’re not from around here,” I said awkwardly.

  “No kidding,” someone replied.
Chuckles.

  We eased onto barstools and made small talk. I mentioned we were in town to visit the astronomy observatory. “Better get there before it closes,” someone muttered, alluding to the facility’s financial troubles. Several couples stared at a sports game on the wall-mounted TV. Two middle-aged men stood up to take a turn at a billiards table, one of them sporting a KKK tattoo on his biceps. He told me his name was J.R. and, unprompted, added that he hated the Puerto Rican migrants who were stealing local jobs. After his pool game, J.R. purchased six bottles of Budweiser to go before peeling away on a four-wheeler with a woman on back.

  A stern-looking bartender hovered by the beer taps. I mentioned that I was fascinated with the local way of life, how the area felt like stepping back in time. The bartender rolled her eyes as if to say, You don’t know the half of it. She told us of a saying, “Goin’ over the mountain,” which was when someone was heading out and would be unavailable by cellphone. We were way, way over the mountain.

  For me, coming here was something of a pilgrimage. I hadn’t owned a cellphone in nearly a decade, even as everyone around me increasingly did, from my elderly grandmother to my prepubescent niece and nephew. More than ever, I felt that I was in an ideological battle against a culture of constant connectivity, fighting the pressure to be like everyone else and get a smartphone. I had conceded to getting an iPod at some point over the years, and even with that pared-down device I sometimes felt as tech-addled as anyone, which was partly why I didn’t want to take the next step of getting an iPhone. Was this remote area of West Virginia the last place where I could resist its influence? The last place where I could fit in without a smartphone?

  IN A SENSE, my journey to the Quiet Zone began in 2009, when I got rid of my first and last cellphone. I had been living in Cambodia for two years, working as a reporter for the Cambodia Daily newspaper and traveling around the region to cover stories. My cellphone was so often at hand that it became an extension of myself. I slept with it. I ate with it. It was a social lifeline. It was also a source of anxiety. In need of a last-minute quote, desperate for a callback from a source, I would stare at the device, willing it to comply. I heard phantom rings and felt phantom vibrations. I was as dependent on my phone as a baby on a pacifier—a real condition, as the marketing professors Shiri Melumad and Michel Pham found in the 2017 research paper “Understanding the Psychology of Smartphone Usage: The Adult Pacifier Hypothesis.” The day I left Cambodia, I dropped my flip phone in a garbage can. I wanted a break.